Alright, you guys are all way ahead of me… can’t make head or tail of much of this (my fault I’m sure not yours!) I’m just on this forum because I can’t decipher which type of Audacity I should download for my (Ubuntu) Dell Netbook. i don’t know what version of Ubuntu I am and certainly don’t recognise which Audacity version would be suitable. How EXACTLY do I find out the former to start trying to understand the latter? Where do I click on my desktop? All help much, much appreciated,
H

HenryD Assuming you have a standard gnome desktop click top left on applications then accessories then terminal. In the terminal type or copy and paste the exact words or characters and then hit enter. For the version number I would type lsb_release -a

To quickly install the recommended audacity using the terminal type sudo apt-get install audacity then enter, then you probably will have to type your ubuntu login password and enter. To generally install and search for stuff I use Synaptic package manager which is under System – administration menu, or you could try the ubuntu software centre which may be easier if your new to this.

To know if the installed Ubuntu is of 32 or 64 bits:
uname -m
If it shows i686 or i386 it means 32 bits.
If it shows x86_64 it means 64 bits.

If the CPU is of 32 bits Ubuntu must be of 32 bits.
If the CPU is of 64 bits it can work in 64 or 32 bits. So we can choose: Ubuntu can be of 32 bits or of 64 bits.

To know if the CPU is of 32 or 64 bits:
a) grep -w lm /proc/cpuinfo
If we see lm in red is of 64 bits. Otherwise is of 32 bits.
b) sudo lshw | grep “description: CPU” -A 12 | grep width
It says clearly what we want to know.

In the command:
sudo lshw | grep “description: CPU” -A 12 | grep width
the quotation marks have to be vertical (straight), not typographic (curly). I put them straight but they become curly here. Just replace them.